New computer modeling suggests the Arctic Ocean may be nearly ice-free in the summertime as early as 2014, Al Gore said Monday at the U.N. climate conference. Northern polar sea ice has been retreating dramatically. These new projections suggest an almost-vanished summer ice cap much earlier than foreseen by a U.S. government agency just eight months ago. "It is hard to capture the astonishment that the experts in the science of ice felt when they saw this," former U.S. Vice President Gore told reporters and other conference participants at a joint briefing with Scandinavian officials and scientists, his first appearance at the two-week session.
The group presented two new reports updating fast-moving developments in Antarctica, the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, and the rest of the Arctic.
"The time for collective and immediate action on climate change is now," said Denmark's foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller.
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